Desolation Island (12 page)

The big man who was suspected of having killed the superintendent was one of the worst cases: his powerful body still heaved convulsively from time to time, but otherwise he might have been a corpse. 'Here,' said Stephen to his assistant, speaking Latin, 'heroic measures are meet to be used. A funnel having been introduced into his pharynx, fifty, nay threescore drops of sulphureous ether are to be administered.' He then prescribed a decoction of orange-peel and Peruvian bark for some of the others, and said, 'These you will be pleased to take from our chest. For my part, I shall overhaul their late surgeon's stores, and see what they contain.'

They contained an extraordinary amount of Hollands gin, a very few books and instruments - cheap, dirty instruments, with rust and old blood still coating the whole length of the large saw - and the Home Office collection of drugs, by no means the same as those supplied to men-of-war by the Sick and Hurt Board. The Home Office pinned its faith more upon rhubarb, grey powder, and hartshorn than did the Sick and Hurt, upon Lucatellus's balsam, polypody of the oak, and, to Stephen's surprise, the alcoholic tincture of laudanum. Three Winchester quarts of it. 'Vade retro,' he cried, seizing the nearest and opening the scuttle: but after the first had gone he paused, and in reasonable, false, considering voice he observed that what was left should be preserved for the use of his patients; there were many contingencies in which the tincture might be of essential consequence to them.

Then, pausing only to summon a wan and hopeless guard, he made his way aft to Mrs Wogan's cabin. It was filled with Mrs Wogan and her attendant, folding sheets, the girl still wearing no more than a blanket pinned across her bosom. In the ensuing fuss Stephen noted that Mrs Wogan at least was capable of decisive action: she placed a shift and a plain dress in the girl's arms, told the guard to take her back to where she had come from, and so dismissed them.

'Good morning, ma'am,' said Stephen, as they faded from view along the dim alleyway, both guard and prisoner screeching at the rats. He advanced into the cabin, so that Mrs Wogan, falling back, received the light from the hanging lantern full in her face. 'My name is Maturin: I am the surgeon of this ship and am come to enquire after your health.' Not the slightest flicker of awareness. Either the woman was the most consummate actress or she had never heard his name. Diana, he reflected bitterly, might not have been so proud of mentioning it. No: he would probe again, several times for conscience sake; but even now he would lay a thousand to one that she had never heard of Stephen Maturin.

Mrs Wogan apologized for the confusion, begged him to sit down, and stated, with many acknowledgements of his goodness, that she was quite well.

'Yet your face is somewhat yellower than could be wished,' said Stephen. 'Give me your hand.' Her pulse was normal: a strong confirmation indeed. 'Now show me your tongue.' No woman can look either handsome or dignified with her mouth wide open and her tongue protruding, and there appeared to be a slight struggle in Mrs Wogan's bosom; but Stephen had all the authority of a physician, and the tongue appeared. 'Well,' he admitted, ''tis a laudable tongue. I dare say you took, a good hearty vomit. They may cry out against the seasickness as much as ever they please, but as an evacuation of the gross humours and crudities, it has no rival.'

'To tell you the truth, sir,' said Mrs Wogan, 'I was not sick at all; only a little indisposed. I have made several voyages to America, and I do not find the motion very troublesome.'

'Then perhaps we should contemplate a purge. Please to inform me of the state of your bowels.'

Mrs Wogan told him frankly how they did, for Stephen had not only the medical man's authority but also his un-human quality - the Hippocratic mask was second nature to him by now - and she might have been confiding in a graven image: yet she did start a little when he asked whether she had any reason to apprehend a pregnancy, and her reply, 'None at all, sir,' was uttered with considerable reserve. There was no coldness, however in the words that followed: 'No, sir; I conceive that I am far more likely to be cribbed and cabined, than confined. And may not my yellow face,' she added with an amused, good-natured ghost of a smile, 'be connected with my cabining? I must not presume to teach a doctor physic, Heaven forbid, but if only I might have a breath of untainted air... I did mention it to the very large gentleman, an officer I believe, that was here earlier in the day, but...'

'You are to consider, madam, that the captain of a man-of-war has a great many things to occupy his mind.'

She folded her hands in her lap, looked down, and said, 'Oh yes, to be sure,' in a low, submissive voice.

Stephen walked away, quite pleased with his pompous, official tone - a good initial position from which to retreat - and reached the forepeak, now clean and as sweet as ever it could be. While he was gazing at it, the enormous pandemonium of all hands to dinner broke out overhead, a familiar pandemonium, preceded, but only just preceded, by the striking of eight bells and the bosun's pipes. Stephen detained a deeply unwilling but civil carpenter's mate for close on ten minutes with his views on the proper accommodation for convicts, and then travelled aft along the lower deck, lighter now that the larboard gun-ports were open, and tight-packed with men, three hundred and more, all sitting at their tables slung between the guns, loudly eating their two pounds of salt beef and a pound of biscuit a head (for this was a Tuesday). The mess deck at dinner time was an impossible, an inconceivable place for an officer, except on Christmas Day, and those who did not know him were worried and distressed. But many of the Leopards had either sailed with Dr Maturin or knew of his ways by the reports of friends: they regarded him as a very valuable creature, but as one unaccountable for his actions outside the sickbay or the cockpit, being brutally ignorant of everything to do with the sea - could scarcely tell the difference between port and starboard, right and wrong - almost an innocent, as one might say. A gentleman to be boasted of, being a genuine physician as well as the boldest hand with a saw in the fleet, but to be concealed from view as much as possible, when in company with other ships. 'Do not stir, I beg,' he cried, as he paced along between the chewing faces, friendly or bemused as the case might be; he was in something of a brown study, reflecting upon the comparison between Diana Villiers and Mrs Wogan, and it was only a particularly familiar face that brought him out of it, the large, red, smiling face of Barret Bonden, Jack Aubrey's coxswain who stood there, swaying with the motion of the ship and holding up a small spoon, clearly for his edification.

'Barrett Bonden,' he said, 'what are you at? Let you all sit down, for God's love.'

The mess, eight powerful man-of-war's men with pigtails to their waists, and an insubstantial, irregular ninth sat down. 'Which we are feeding Herapath, sir,' said Bonden. 'Tom Davis pounds the biscuit in the mess-kid here, Joe Plaice mixes in our juice in t'other, to make a right smooth pap, and I send it home with this little spoon, a very small spoon, like you said, your honour. A silver teaspoon Killick lent me from the cabin.'

Stephen looked at the first kid, which contained a good pound of shattered biscuit, and at the second, which held a rather greater quantity of pap: he considered Herapath (barely recognizable in his purser's slops) whose eyes were fixed with painful eagerness upon the spoon. 'Well,' said he, 'if you give him a third part of what is in the tub, and the rest at five times, say at each eighth bell, you may make a seaman of him yet, rather than a corpse; for you arc to observe, that it is less the dimensions of the spoon, than the sum total, the aggregate of the pap, that counts.'

In the great cabin he found the Leopard's captain sitting in the midst of a large quantity of papers: it was clear that he had a great many things to occupy his mind, but Stephen had every intention of adding more as soon as Jack should have finished with the purser's accounts. In the meantime he continued his reflection: the comparison between Diana Villiers and Mrs Wogan really would not hold. They both had black hair and blue eyes, and they were much of an age; but Mrs Wogan was a good two inches shorter, and those two inches made an extraordinary difference - the difference between a woman who was tall and one who was not. Cleopatra's nose. But above all, Mrs Wogan lacked the infinite grace that ravished Stephen's heart every time Diana walked across a room. As to her face, it was scarcely fair to judge, after what she had been through so very recently: yet in spite of the want of bloom and the yellowish complexion, there was a likeness, a superficial likeness striking enough to make even a casual observer think of some close relationship; but as far as he could judge in this short space of time, Mrs Wogan's face had been formed by a somewhat gentler habit of mind. It was resolute enough; but in spite of her dangerous calling he thought it the outward expression of a milder, less cruel and imperious, and perhaps a more naive and even affectionate nature: not that that was saying much. A leopard to Diana's tiger, perhaps. 'A poor figure,' he said, remembering the leopards he had known, none remarkable for mildness or naivety. 'But smaller in any case: on a smaller scale.'

'There, Mr Benton,' said Jack. 'All square by the lifts and braces.' And when the purser had borne his books away, 'Stephen, I am all yours.'

'Then be so good as to bring your mind to bear on my convicts. I say my convicts, because I am answerable for their health, which, let me tell you, is tolerably precarious.'

'Yes, yes, Pullings and I have dealt with that. Hammocks are to be slung in the forepeak, Navy-fashion - no more of that vile straw. The people are to be aired on the forecastle, a dozen at a time, once in the forenoon and once in the first dog-watch; your wind-sail will have been rigged before the day is out; and when you and the chaplain have reported on them, we shall see which can be let out of irons. For exercise, they can pump ship.'

'And Mrs Wogan, is she too to pump ship? As a medical man, I tell you she cannot long survive in that damp, mephitic, lightless cupboard. She too must have air.'

'Ah, there you have me, Stephen. What are we to do with her? I have found a note in the superintendent's papers: he was directed to allow her all proper indulgences consistent with security and good order - the services of a female attendant - her own stores to the extent of one and a half ton. No word about exercise.'

'What is the custom in the common transports that go to Botany Bay, when they carry privileged persons?'

'I don't know. I asked the turnkeys - God-damned half-baked whoreson lubbers - and all they could tell me was that Barrington, the pickpocket, you remember, was allowed to mess with the bosun. But that is neither here nor there: he was only a flash kiddy, while Mrs Wogan is clearly a gentlewoman... By the way, Stephen, did you notice the extraordinary likeness between her and Diana?'

'I did not, sir,' said Stephen, and a brief silence followed, in which Jack regretted having mentioned a name that might have caused a wound - 'Laid by the lee again, Jack' - and at the same time he wondered how it came about that Stephen should have grown so hellfire peevish these recent days.

'I cannot very well invite her to walk the quarterdeck,' he said. 'That would certainly be improper, since she has been condemned. A very dangerous woman, it appears -blazed away right, left and centre when she was taken.'

'Certainly you would not wish to associate with a malefactor; though I believe there is an excellent precedent for doing so, as your chaplain may tell you. Then as you so rightly say, there is the danger; and I appreciate your anxiety to the full. No doubt she has a brace of pistols in her pocket. Allow me to suggest, however, that she should have the liberty of walking on the gangway at stated intervals, and occasionally, in clement weather, upon the poop. I must confess that to reach the poop she would have to traverse the holy quarterdeck, and your not unnatural apprehension - I shall not say your timidity -will no doubt require you to have a carronade, loaded with grape, trained upon her as she does so. Nevertheless, this seems to me a valid solution of the difficulty.'

Jack was well acquainted with Stephen's ferocious defence of his patients, even the most unseamanlike of them, once they were under his hands: adding to this the likeness that had so struck him, and to his friend's present unparalleled acerbity (for Stephen had not spoken with a smile: there had been a cruel edge to his voice), he checked the words that were rising in his throat. It called for a considerable effort, however, for Jack was neither the most patient nor the most long-suffering of men, and it seemed to him that on this occasion Stephen had let his tongue run away with him. Rather stiffly he said, 'I shall consider of it,' and for once he was not displeased when the drum beat Roast Beef of Old England a moment later, summoning Dr Maturin away to his dinner in the wardroom.

The Leopard's was a fine great wardroom, with plenty of space for all its officers and for the guests they loved to invite, in their hospitable Navy fashion; a long room terminating in a vast stern-window right across its breadth, and one that seemed longer still because of the twenty-foot table running down its middle. The lieutenants' cabins on either side: boarding-pikes, tomahawks, cutlasses, pistols, swords, arranged in tasteful groups upon the bulkhead and the sides. And today, almost for the first time, it had its full complement; for during the quite exceptionally rough passage down the Channel and across the Bay, dinner had rarely seen more than half a dozen at a time. Now the only man missing was Turnbull, the officer of the watch; there were blue coats in plenty, with scarlet for the Marines, black for the chaplain, and watchet-blue purser's jackets for the boys that waited behind the sailors' chairs, all bright and fresh at this beginning of a new commission; a pleasant sight in the brilliance of the reflected sun, but one that had little effect on Stephen's morosity. He had rarely felt a more general irritation nor less certainty of being able to control it, and he plied his spoon as though salvation lay at the bottom of his soup-plate. In a way it did: the barley-broth, glutinous and lenitive, helped to bring his inner man more nearly in harmony with his outward appearance - so much for free-will - and by the time they reached the first remove little effort was needed for a proper complaisance. The conversation at the wardroom table was banal in the extreme, commonplace and polite: a caution natural in men who were to be messmates for the next couple of years or so and who wished to sound their way at first, and to find out their messmates' nature, neither giving nor receiving any offence that might rankle for the next ten thousand miles, to break out at last in the Antipodes.